Question about Slug translation in Flarum 1.3

masihdindar

Hi there,
Recently V1.3 just released and they mentioned that we have option to translate slug for non-english languages. But how we can use this?
I have a Persian language's forum and i can't find option for slug translation. Is there any tricks need to use this? Should we install custom extension? I didn't get it 🙁

clarkwinkelmann

masihdindar Flarum uses Laravel's Str::slug method which itself uses the portable-ascii library.

That library accepts a language parameter that changes how transliteration is done.

Previously, the language would always be "en". Now the forum default language is used instead.

What changes exactly depending on the language provided is difficult to say, because that library does a lot of stuff behind the scenes. From my observations it seems to be mostly to enable language-specific replacement patterns, like the german ß and similar, but it seems like for other languages it enables entire ranges of characters that were previously ignored.

There might still be languages that aren't supported by portable-ascii at all, or maybe the language pack uses a different language code that portable-ascii doesn't recognize.

Hari

masihdindar think twice before switching entire forum to other language other than English.

At this moment flarum is not supporting unicode slug it is planned to be added in next release.

As per my experience if i turn on hindi language i still see a translated version of slugs in english insted of actual Hindi characters in slug.

If you set default language to parsian after future update - unicode slug support.. again all urls will be changed which may cause huge redirection issues (according to Google all urls will be changed)

I suggest you to wait till v1.4

luceos

Hi everyone,

To give this new tag some body without throwing myself in as dead weight 😂 Here is an idea I had based on the recent question from masihdindar.

Is it technically possible to offer a fully unicode compliant slug handler?
Do we want to offer this as a core, bundled or community feature?

I hope the team can answer the technical complications involved and the community will upvote if they like this proposal.

meihuak

clarkwinkelmann yes, we pause to update to v1.3, i think it is a temporary version

clarkwinkelmann

Hari a translated version of slugs in english

This is exactly what "transliteration" means. URLs are converted into an ASCII-only version which historically had better support across browsers and would be rendered in URL bars without any % encoding. The changes in 1.3 only improve transliteration by transliterating more characters or switching how some characters are transliterated based on the language. The output is still ASCII by definition.

Slugs/transliteration is most useful when generating unique identifiers because you usually want to limit the number of allowed characters in such a value. In Flarum discussion slugs aren't used for any uniqueness, only for SEO/aesthetics, so we can definitely use a verbatim or at least Unicode-enabled slugger as well. Even if this is not available in the current Flarum version, an extension could easily provide such a slugger until Flarum includes one.

If the transliterated slugs look too bad in your forum language, you can also use the "ID only" slug driver, which will not put any slug after the ID. Most users (particularly on mobile) probably wouldn't notice the difference anyway, and it probably has very low SEO impact anyway since search engines put the page content above all.